818 Belmont.

I played the shit out of Symphony Of The Night. I replayed it when it was bonus content on a PSP game. The PSP game it was packaged with was shit and I don’t think I ever finished it. If I did I don’t remember doing it. It’s pretty shameful when your shiny upgraded remake is outshined by the game you stuck in as an after thought. I essentially bought that game so I could replay SOTN on a portable. I did not feel cheated.

I hope that style of gameplay never fades away completely. If the Xbox Arcade game they patterned after it is any indication the style is safe. It was apparently popular. I didn’t get it because it’s essentially a version of the gameplay stripped of the stuff I like about it, but it’s a placeholder at any rate.

The other day I asked this question in a Deviantart poll: Is a single image with text underneath it a comic?

The results were more or less 50-50. Yes was slightly ahead if you want to get technical. Those results were interesting on their own, but the comments made me wonder something else. Is there a standard nomenclature for comics?

The reason I wonder is that some people said an image with text undernead is a cartoon, but I think of the word cartoon as meaning an animated film. A lot of words we throw around are used interchangably by some people. There must be a standard, right? It makes things confusing if there isn’t. I guess that’s why we use modifiers to clarify our thoughts.

Comic, can mean several things. It can be a comic book, a single strip, a single image with text under, a book of collected strips, and so on. The word comic is like the word art in that it’s meaning is so broad it’s hard to pin down what it is. I guess it’s all of that stuff and more.

For the record, I think that a single image with text under is a comic. That includes demotivator memes. They may be crude, but they aren’t orders of magnitude different than Family Circus, and are typically more entertaining. My views on are are similar in so far as I think that anything humans construct is art. Some of it may be shitty and stupid, but under this broad definition it still counts.

Considdering how specific english is as a language stuff like this is kind of weird.

Another thing that I find weird is that humor is almost always a factor when people decide if something is a comic or not, but comics don’t have to be funny at all. All they really have to do is make some kind of statement.

35 Comments

Well one of the best ‘comic’s i’ve had the please of reading was The Phoenix Requiem. And though it had it’s funny moments the whole tone of the thing dealt with far more than humour. The art however in that will blow your mind. In my opinion comics can have a ratio of things: humour/artwork/good story and the varyance is what portion of these each comic has of each.

The clan of vampire hunters who star in most of the Castlevania games are the Belmonts. Alucard is the character that actually says the line though. I might just as well have used his name, or any number of other options.

Also, the quote is often attributed to Burke but he never said it. It’s my understanding that others boiled down the phrase from ideas he presented in his writings.

Come now, if not for Rondo of Blood there would have not been a Symphony of the Night. And Rondo is great, you just have to have a love for the classic style of Castlevania before the more recent “Metroid-vania” craze.

Ugh. Those motivational things are not comics unless the person who made it did the art for it. If you want to have something to cover things that aren’t funny use sequential art?

I’d say it has to be drawn to be a comic. I don’t care what you say your random photos with words over them are not comics. It’s a picture book. Learn to draw if you want to call it a comic. Sprite comics are borderline. On one hand someone drew it. On the other hand you’re a shitty person. Learn to draw.

What constitutes “drawn”, anyway? Does diesel sweeties, where the art has never had even passing acquaintance with a pen, meet your requirements for ascending to the exalted status of “comic”? Is there a real moral difference between producing your art by making and posing sprites in a graphics manipulation program and building and posing Lego figurines and photographing them?

Yeah, I remember getting the PSP Rondo of Blood around the same time as a friend of mine. We hang about once a week, and when we did he asked how far I got on Rondo. I said: “Um…not very. I unlocked Symphony of the Night and…you know.”. He’s like “Haven’t you played that a million times already?” I answered “Yes. Yes I have. And now I’m playing it again.” I made the excuse that I wanted to try it out with Maria…but I didn’t do that until later. I was totally Alucarding it up (I even went ahead and gathered up the cash for the dupilcator again). I will never let that game die. That, and Super Metroid.

As for the comic topic: I’ve never really thought of it as a question. I always assumed that, yes, a picture with a caption is a comic. Then again, you just introduced to me the idea that a motivational poster (funny internet ones or otherwise) follow the same description. I might have disagreed, but you do point out that the words and the picture are put together by someone, and though that may be minimal work, I guess it still counts as art. I mean, if they count all that deranged shit I learned in “contemporary writing” as art, then I suppose a motivational poster would be the same.

Speaking of contemporary art in general (which is what that class mostly ended up being about, rather than the writing); Dadaism is fuckin’ INSANE. If they’re “artists”, then I suppose anything that someone cobbled together is art.

i think ‘comic’ covers everything in “the funny pages”, single frame with text, or multiple frames, funny or not. superhero comics are not primarilly funny, but they are comics. mary worth is never funny, but still counts. this extends to your new fangled “webcomics” on those intertube thingies the kids all use these days. but, like prior comment says, drawn art with words, not demotivationals. but where does that leave http://asofterworld.com/ ?

comic strip, at least in my head, is specifically for those in the newspaper style of a small handful of frames together. like a film strip.

Symphony of the Night was the zenith of the Castelvania series. It’s the sole reason I still have my original Playstation hooked up to the TV and ready to go at a moment’s notice. Wish they’d take the formula and stick it on the big screen: the DS gives me migraines.

Edmund Burke said some similar things, but I don’t think these are his words, either. It’s been a long time since I’ve read any of his work. Wikiquote thinks it may have come from an English translation of a Russian film adaptation of Lev Tolstoy’s War and Peace (don’t write in to correct me and say it was Leo Tolstoy; his parents named him Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, Russian, not English).

I don’t think I ever had such philosophical conversations with any of my bosses. I get blank stares when I use comments that reference Parkinson’s Law or the Peter Principle. In my first IT job, 20 years or so ago, I kept the set of The Complete Monty Python’s Flying Circus: All the Words on my desk shelf. My Team Leader was a big Python fan, and one of those guys who would approach with his index finger in the air when he had an idea. When he got to my desk, he would spot the books, become distracted and take one down, thumb through until he found a routine he liked, and we would run through the bit to its end. Having forgotten his brilliant idea, he would return to his desk, only to reappear when he remembered. Is Python philosophy?

I haven’t been out to DeviantArt lately; Hurricane Irene has left power and cable uncertain at home and DA is blocked at work. I think the answer to your question is basically yes. Some of the earliest comics were subtitled or captioned political or social commentary cartoons, the word balloon (or speech bubble) coming a bit later. In modern newspapers we find there is one exception: Scott Adams’ Dilbert is not a comic.

Where is the like button for this comment? I wanna debate hitting the like button for this, but eventually decide not to for reasons that really have nothing to do with liking or disliking this comment.

I think a comic is essentially non-cartoon sequential art (cartoons being animated shows/movies). Now this is not to say that single panel comics are not comic, though, as you can hint at the passage of time with only one panel. If there’s dialogue, then it obviously takes time to talk, if it shows the result of some action then it implies that the cause happened, if it’s a one panel comic where each update advances the story, then it could be considered a comic in the traditional sense, only different in that it’s moving one panel at a time. Now this does suggest that some demotivationals could be loosely considered comics, but I can live with that. The biggest real grey area in this definition, though is comics that use animated panels (like MSPA), are they comics or cartoons?

Hehe. Funny story, Castlevania turns 25 this month — the original game was released in Japan on 26 Sept. 1986.

That said, I think you’ll have to put me down as preferring Portrait of Ruin over Symphony. I wasn’t the biggest fan of the reverse castle, I like most of the bosses a bit more in Portrait, the Nest of Evil challenge is actually pretty clever (it’s rather odd how much more I prefer the Dawn of Sorrow bosses here), and (PSP port of SOTN notwithstanding) is delightfully portable. Also, it has the Vampire Killer.

I always considered comics to be illustrations that make a statement. Far Side is an excellent example, because there are many far side comics that are only an image. So whether a single panel or a thousand issues, it’s all a comic.

Castlevania is the shit. I enjoyed Portrait of Ruin quite a bit, and I used to have one for the N64.

Of course, there are a few things that should be noted about recycling. Currently, it may be worse for most products to be recycled, and the only thing that actually is worth it at this time to recycle is aluminum cans. Also, according to some things I’ve heard, recycling paper to save trees actually has the opposite effect. There’s less need for trees when it’s recycled, and thus, less trees are kept.

Some folks seem to be confused about the subtleties of cartoon and comic.

If you think cartoon refers strictly to a moving picture consisting of drawn elements, that is actually a very late usage of the word. The word shares its roots in Dutch and Italian with the word carton, since both were made from cardboard or similar materials. Painters of frescoes, such as Michelangelo Buonarroti and Leonardo da Vinci (the artists, not the turtles) drew their original art on a cardboard pattern or cartone, pricked holes along the outlines, and then transferred the image to the final surface by tapping the cartone with a cloth bag of soot or powdered charcoal. Animated cartoons go back only a little more than a century, and it has only been since the 1920s that the word cartoon has been used by itself to describe such a film. Of course today, it is possible to create animation without using cardboard, paper or film.

The word comic comes from the Greek k?mikos and the Latin c?micus and just means funny — as in comedy. Applied to art, general usage is more toward sequential art (comic strips, comic books) while we are more likely to use cartoon to describe single-panel humorous work. Peanuts, Superman and The Spirit are comics, Marmaduke, The Family Circus and political cartoons are examples of (single-panel) cartoons.

Okay, who remembers Ned Riddles’s Mr. Tweedy or Ted Key’s Hazel?

As for a Like button, I’ve seen websites that have Rave and Dis buttons. Although that’s a discussion for another day…